Reviewers of documents often write annotations in the margins of pages that are being read. These annotations can indicate a reviewer's thoughts on a particular passage in a document, can highlight a portion of the document that the reviewer finds important, etc. Thereafter, if the reviewer subsequently reviews the document, the reviewer can quickly locate portions of the document that the reviewer previously found important, and can review annotations in the margins to refresh the memory of the reviewer.
In a particular example, a researcher (one who is researching a particular topic to generate a research paper) can read numerous documents and can annotate several of such documents in connection with generating a new research paper that is germane to the topics that are discussed in the documents being reviewed by the researcher. When composing the resulting research paper, the researcher can review the multiple annotations made to the papers for purposes of citation and analysis.
In another example, students often annotate textbooks or articles in an effort to improve memory regarding a particular topic that is discussed in the textbooks or articles. Thus, when a student attempts to commit a particular topic to memory, the student need not re-read the entire portion of a textbook, but can quickly review the annotations made previously by the student.
It can be ascertained, however, that while a single individual can annotate literary works to add some value to such literary works, these annotations remain solely accessible to the annotator. Therefore, while a second researcher, for instance, may find the annotations of a first researcher to be quite useful with respect to a particular topic, the second researcher will be unable to easily obtain these annotations even if the first researcher wished to share them. This is because conventionally the annotations are made in the margins of paper documents, which are not easily shareable amongst several people.
Some word processing applications have been implemented with functionality that allows users of such applications to provide or enter comments corresponding to particular portions of text being displayed by way of the word processing application. Enabling researchers to annotate documents in the word processing application allows for sharing of annotations to be done somewhat more readily, as a word processing document can be e-mailed between researchers and word processing documents can be readily duplicated. Effectively sharing annotations using conventional word processing applications, however, requires that the first researcher and second researcher are familiar with one another, and further require that the first researcher has knowledge that the second researcher would like to receive or study the annotations made by the first researcher.